Thread: New Border Patrol ally brings support, maybe new agents

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Home Subscribe Customer Service Contact Us Advertise About Us Help October 10th, 2006
New Border Patrol ally brings support, maybe new agents
By STEPHEN LOSEY
October 10, 2006
SAN DIEGO — On the border here with Tijuana, Mexico, the desert is cracked and blistered from heat that can sometimes rival Iraq’s, some National Guardsmen say.
Temperatures can reach 110 degrees, and the 1,280 Guardsmen deployed to help secure the California-Mexico border have to keep themselves hydrated. The sweltering heat also makes it trickier to fly helicopters and limits the time they can stay in the air, and the mountainous terrain throws unexpected gusts of wind that can whip a helicopter 180 degrees in an instant.
There’s violence, too. Border Patrol agents face the occasional Molotov cocktail or heavy rock thrown from the Mexican side of the border, and have been threatened for doing their job. Though no Guardsmen have been attacked or threatened, the Guard is concerned for their safety.
But for California Guardsman and Iraq veteran Sgt. Roberto, who said his commanding officer ordered him not to give his last name to the press, Operation Jump Start has at least one advantage over his previous duty.

“I don’t wake up to the smell of gunpowder every morning,” he said.
The National Guard is now doing a wide variety of jobs to back up the Border Patrol: flying reconnaissance missions, ferrying Border Patrol agents via helicopter, building roads and fences, improving drainage so land under the fences doesn’t erode, watching for border crossers with infrared scopes and binoculars, auto maintenance and other duties.
They do pretty much everything except actually arresting illegal aliens, said Master Sgt. Michael Drake, a spokesman for the California National Guard.
“It’s not like an episode of ‘COPS,’” Drake said. “People think we’re riding shotgun with a Border Patrol agent, rifle at ready, looking to capture illegals, but that’s not it at all.”
The result of the National Guard’s help, said Border Patrol spokesman Mario Martinez, is that 394 agents who would have been occupied elsewhere have been deployed to the line. That includes 96 agents in California’s two sectors.
For 1st Lt. Phuc Tran, a helicopter pilot and flight platoon leader, securing the border means flying two patrol missions per day, three days a week. Tran and nine other pilots in his platoon fly four OH-58 Kiowa helicopters or a UH-1 Huey helicopter on their two main types of missions: terrain denial or interdiction.
For terrain denial, the pilots make no effort to be sneaky or hide. They fly along the border and kick up noise to either deter people from trying to cross the border or to drive people back to Mexico who have already crossed.
“We want to scare them,” Tran said. “We let them know we are there. That’s my favorite mission, even though it’s more fun to catch people — it saves a lot of money for the government by not having to process them.”
For air-to-ground interdiction missions, the pilots try to stay hidden as long as possible, and then speed into the area and force border crossers to hide long enough for Border Patrol agents to catch them. The Guard also can quickly deploy four to eight Border Patrol agents in Huey helicopters as part of an insertion mission.
The Guard now flies only day missions along the 145-mile California-Mexico border, but expects to go round-the-clock within a few months, when it gets night vision equipment.
Now, one Border Patrol agent flies with two Guard pilots on each mission to speak to agents on the ground and find out where the helicopters are needed.
During those missions, the agent teaches pilots the ins and outs of patrolling the border — for example, how to identify local landmarks such as Tecate Mountain, Arnie’s Point, Washer Woman or Pilot’s Peak.
“They don’t use grid coordinates, or anything,” Tran said. “We just have to learn it.”
The Border Patrol is also learning how to communicate with pilots, Tran said.
“Sometimes they’ll say, ‘They’re over there!’ and I say, ‘Where?’ “ Tran said. “I’m used to, ‘Three o’clock, 2,000 feet.”
Guardsmen patrolling the border have to learn that they’re not going to get every illegal crosser, Tran said. It’s not worth pushing the helicopters in places with dangerously high temperatures and furious winds, when any aliens captured and returned to Mexico will likely try again in a few days.
But letting an illegal crosser pass can be frustrating for some, since the military has trained them to accomplish their missions, Tran said.
Sometimes the missions can save lives, Tran said. One pair of helicopter pilots tracked footprints on the sand dunes by the Arizona-California border until they found six illegal immigrants who were near death and rescued them.
Sometimes the targets can provide a laugh, such as one crosser Tran caught Sept. 22 traversing the desert in a bright orange shirt visible from five miles away.
“You see some weird stuff out here,” Tran said. “They always wear bright colors. I don’t know if they are trying to allow me to see them, or what.”
Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1980, and his family filed papers to allow him to emigrate to the United States as a political refugee almost as soon as he was born. He bounced around refugee camps in the Philippines and Thailand while his young, malnourished body grew heavier and stronger. He arrived in the United States when he was 5 years old and became a citizen eight years later.
“I get this question a lot from my family — ‘You’re an immigrant, why are you performing a mission that is keeping out illegal immigrants?’ “ Tran said. “My response to that is, ‘I went through the legal channel.’ All I’m asking is for everyone else to follow the same procedure.”
Some Guardsmen are finding their new duty could become a career.
Two soldiers operating an infrared scope truck on a ridge — Sgt. Roberto and his partner, Sgt. Zora, who also was ordered not to give her last name — are planning to join the Border Patrol. They view Operation Jump Start as the best kind of on-the-job training.
Sgt. Roberto said on Sept. 27 he has wanted to join the Border Patrol for a long time for the stability of a federal job and he will attend the academy in Artesia, N.M., in two months.
“I also want to keep working for this country and to keep it safe,” Sgt. Roberto said.
Martinez said the agency does not know how many Guardsmen are planning to join, but said it is hearing anecdotal evidence of increased interest.
Sgts. Roberto and Zora have been deployed since June, and are still learning the terrain they have to scan each day. That means figuring out where the best hiding spots are in the ridges and mountains and how to angle the scope to get the best views.
“Some of them are really good,” Sgt. Roberto said. “They know exactly where to hide.”
That can be under bushes or shrubs, for example. But the heat-detecting infrared scope, mounted to a pickup truck, is good for catching those who are hiding. The heat signatures are especially visible at night, Sgt. Roberto said.
E-mail: slosey@federaltimes.com
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We could use all the help we can get. The more Border Patrol Agents the better. We could also use more ICE agents.